Habitat Restoration Coming to Kohl Park

Kohl Park proposed trail map. Milwaukee County Parks.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) will kickstart an environmental cleanup project in Milwaukee County’s Kohl Park.

The state agency is providing Milwaukee County Parks a grant to to begin planning a habitat restoration project near N. 76th Street and the Milwaukee-Ozaukee county line. The goal, according to project documents, is to restore unique forest and grassland habitats in the large park.

The project also falls within the larger effort to delist the Milwaukee Estuary as an Area of Concern (AOC). The federal AOC designation was given to the estuary — composed of the Milwaukee, Menomonee and Kinnickinic Rivers — in 1987. It means the estuary is severely environmentally degraded.

Local governments, and quasi-governmental organizations like the local sewerage district, have worked with the DNR on several projects within the estuary aimed at restoring habitats and remediating environmental degradation. Most recently, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) finished constructing a fish passage through Kletszch Park, removing the largest fish barrier on the Milwaukee River between Grafton and Lake Michigan.

The DNR is giving Parks $200,000 to begin planning the habitat restoration. The county’s AOC specialist, Natalie Dutack, will oversee the project for the county.

Kohl Park is a “high priority” park for habitat restoration for several reasons, according to a report from the Parks department. First, the park is big: 266 acres. Second, it has approximately 50 acres of agricultural land that can be converted to native grassland and Oak savanna, which is a habitat that is “extremely rare in the AOC due to predominance of floodplain forests and existing urban development.” And finally, once the habitat is restored, it will create a 1,143-acre habitat block by connecting to nearby MMSD Greenseams parcels, the Little Menomonee River Parkway and the Mequon Nature Preserve, making it the largest habitat block in the county.

Kohl Park provides important habitat for multiple species of grassland flora and fauna. Large contiguous grassland habitats are rare, making the project critical to achieving the goals for wildlife population restoration in the AOC.

The project will also fold neatly into the county’s strategic plan to achieve racial equity. It will support the county’s environmental justice goals by restoring a natural area, and access to it, in a part of the county where a majority of residents are Black. There currently is little access to the property for residents. But Parks is developing an extension of the Oak Leaf Trail through the park, a project which has registered significant support in the surrounding community, according to Parks.